Mikko Hypponen, chief
research officer at F-Secure Corporation in Finland, has tracked
computer viruses
since they began -- identifying the Sasser outbreak, and briefing
governments about the Stuxnet worm. "I
love the internet," he said, as he showed a 5 ¼-inch floppy disk
containing BRAIN.A, the first PC virus his team found, back in
1986. "We know where it came from," he said. "It says so inside the
code." Which, indeed, it did -- revealing the name, address and
phone number of the Pakistan-based writers:

Six months ago, Hypponen decided to go and visit that address in
Lahore -- where, indeed, he knocked on the door and found the two
brothers who wrote the virus, Basit and Amjad Farooq Alvi. "And
both had had their computers infected dozens of times by other
viruses," Hypponen explained. "So there's some sort of justice in
the world."

It was a way of explaining how viruses are now a global problem:
his firm finds hundreds of thousands of pieces of malware every
day, much of it now written by organised crime gangs. He showed the
Russian website Gangsta Bucks, where infected computers are traded.
He showed a live list of available credit card numbers, with
matching customer addresses (which I can only hope will be obscured
when the video of the talk goes on TED.com). He also explained how he
traced a line in another virus's code to St Petersburg: the virus
writer had included his car registration in the code as a means of
declaring authorship. "But mostly we don't even know which
continent they're in," Hypponen said. And mostly the resources to
fight such criminals are simply not made available.

"If we don't fight online crime, we're running a risk of
losing," he concluded. "We have to do it globally, and right now.
We have to find the people with the skills [to write these viruses]
but before they have the opportunity."

Former BBC journalist Misha Glenny, author
of the great book McMafia, about his journey in the
criminal underworld, offered a similar plea for governments to
engage with criminal hackers, rather than jail them. He cited a
story covered in WIRED a few months ago about Max Butler, who as "Iceman"
crowned himself king of a global online fraud network. "I don't
think people like [Butler] should be in jail," Glenny said.
"Hackers should be recruited and mobilised on behalf of the state.
We need to engage and find ways of offering guidance to these
people. Or we will be nurturing a monster we cannot tame."

The evidence is everywhere that "we are at the beginning of a
mighty struggle for control of the internet", Glenny said. He cited
Anonymous's targeting of Fox News -- raising a laugh for pointing
out "the irony of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp being a victim of
hacking for a change". A security friend told Glenny that there are
two types of company: those that know they have been hacked, and those
that don't.

He cited six examples of hackers who learned their skills in
their early to mid tenns; who each had an advanced ability in maths
and science; who failed to demonstrated any real social skills; and
who consistently manifested a degree of Asperger's syndrome (which,
Glenny said Simon Baron-Cohen told him, is also evident in Gary
McKinnon -- currently facing prosecution in the US).